@HamZa yeah, later coming: Stack Overflow Academy College (how to ask good questions on SO Academy) and Stack Overflow Academy College School (prepare young folks of how to ask question on SO College). Resolution: What. A. Dumb.

@rene naw, you're cool! I'm indifferent about it, really. We can't know for sure until it launches, but it seems kind of redudantly useless and it would be better to have just a site that is for "how to ask good questions" , like questioners.SE , not just for how to ask on SO

cv-plz Too broad / unclear: stackoverflow.com/questions/24213359/… - OP does not specify authentication method details, answers are all over the place, comment discussions on answers are also all over the place, and I suck at chat.

I can only afford to spare 10 minutes a day at most to the task of reviewing questions in the Close Review Queue, but since it's an extremely time-consuming process, I've recently just given up completely on closing questions through the queue. Which is sort of a waste, because I have a whopping ...

Given the ever growing close vote review queue, I think it would help things along if we could streamline the filtering a little more.
At the moment we can filter by tag and by close reason, but off-topic has 7 sub-close-reasons. It may improve the workflow a bit to be able to narrow it down to ...

I've got an idea for a simulator game - something like transport tycoon or sim city. I know Java & Python but don't know C++. I've developed lots of web things but never games or graphics.
I've heard about Unity and it looks like it might make things easier for me. But will I need to learn C++ t...

I find that as the declaration "pro only" doesn't address his point, but instead leaves his final point opinionated and without a base. I was just googling about the plugin, and I still think there could be a more concrete point than it's "pros only".

When you can explain to me why SO was created and how it is useful to both individuals and the collective community of programmers on the Internet, we can have an informed discussion of whether or not SOA aligns with those goals.

@Shog9 I don't think I could reach even a fraction of the level of embarrassment you brought on yourself with that proposal. On the surface SOA appears to be helpful and good-intentioned, but if you take 5 seconds to think about the type of user it attracts and the path a user takes to get there, it's not just ridiculous, it's damaging.

@hichris123 But that's the thing. SOA is particularly dangerous (in my opinion) because it's the type of thing, I think, that both feels really good to support and does a ton of long term damage. I will do my best to not give it a chance, because I suspect it will get enough bandwagoning to make it never go away, regardless of consequences.

Remember the same people who are allowed to ask crappy questions are also allowed to support and run a network site. This one is like a help vampire virus.

@hichris123 I have grave doubts as to whether such a site could work. But not because of "crappy people" - them's par for the course on the 'Net, indeed everwhere; a system that can't tolerate ignorance and laziness is doomed to failure. If it fails, it'll fail for the same reasons that any site fails: not enough participants with concrete problems or not enough people with concrete solutions.

@Shog9 But what really seems off to me is that MSO theoretically lets people do this already. And you had made a comment (and a dubious analogy) that MSO wasn't working for this purpose. I really don't understand how rebranding meta with a different URL solves whatever problem you saw with meta that was causing these people to skip it. It just creates whatever shortcoming meta has again, but with a different URL and front page theme.

@JasonC let's try a different approach... Assume a reasonably-intelligent but inexperienced asker, able to provide sufficient detail and write with clarity... What problem is his question most likely to suffer from on Stack Overflow?

@Shog9 No; you're missing the key thing that sets SOA apart from other network sites, which is that it is essentially a stepping stone to SO. No other network site acts as a filter / gateway to another network site. Any attitudes / practices that SOA encourages become the background for new users who pass through there and onto SO. And SOA naturally encourages asking questions about things that are easily findable.

@Shog9 Because it's always easier to ask somebody else to do your work rather than do it yourself. It's less effort and less time commitment, you can just wait for the other person to use their time to do what you should have done.

@JasonC Do you believe that? I've asked all of 9 questions on Stack Overflow... Over the course of nearly 6 years. I'm nothing if not lazy - yet I search compulsively and ask rarely... Am I an anomaly? Do you prefer asking to searching?

And your assumption is slanted a bit. You say "reasonably-intelligent but inexperienced", but you leave up in the air whether or not he values doing his own work vs. asking others to do his research for him. Such a person could totally show prior effort and not post a duplicate, or could not put any effort in at all. Wherever you are going with this is totally fuzzied by the fact that you left a specification of this quality out of your hypothetical asker.

What you are actually attempting to do is rather weaselly I think: You're purposefully leading me on to talk about how his problem is most likely a duplicate but based on an example person who "sounds good on paper". So be honest with your hypothetical qualities. Say "Assume a reasonably intelligent, but lazy asker".

@JasonC does showing effort necessarily preclude a duplicate? I've often observed otherwise; indeed, I commented on this duplicate just a little bit ago because it was in danger of being reopened and yet is clearly a duplicate (albeit one with copious amounts of effort shown).

@JasonC why?

@JasonC Why? I'm lazy. Yet I ask few questions, and rarely duplicates. Why is "lazy" a necessary part of a description for you?

@Shog9 1) I dislike when others ask me to search for them and do not wish that on anybody else. 2) It is generally faster, in reality, to search then ask. 3) I am often frustrated by internet noise in search results and do not want to contribute to it with more duplicate content.

@Shog9 What do you mean "why is lazy a necessary part"? Sure; being panicked with a short deadline and not having enough time to search (or at least thinking you don't), could be a reason as well (which I disagree with), but generally, some amount of laziness / entitlement, I think, is always associated with asking before searching.

@JasonC simple: I want more folks like me on SO. Or, perhaps not so much like me as like you. Maybe like @hichris123. Whatever; the point is, folks with many, many negative qualities who are none the less able to find answers to their questions without actually asking them most of the time and able to ask reasonable questions on those rare occasions when they can't find the answer.

The problem to solve here is... How do you get someone from Point A (knows nothing, can't search, can't debug) to Point B (knows how to break a problem down into questions they can self-answer 99% of the time, knows how to present the remaining 1% in a form that others can understand and answer)?

I don't have a lot of experience on SO, but I know on a lot of the sites I participate in heavily, most of the duplicates that could have been answered by searching are situations where the asker clearly didn't even know the basic terms to use in a search

@AJHenderson So as I see it, we have a need that's not being met right now. A set of knowledge that isn't being efficiently transferred from the folks who've learned it (via trial and error or whatever) to the folks who need to learn it.

yeah, that's my main concern as far as SOA goes is longevity. I think there are good questions that can be asked there, but I mostly worry about long term discoverability, but then again, it probably is something needed by the broader community, so better to try to isolate it someplace where those participating are interested in helping with that

I doubt it will be "successful" in the traditional SE sense, but I do think it could provide a lot of value potentially too

@Shog9 Ok, look. Let's say for the sake of argument that a reasonable ... reason ... for asking before searching is because even an intelligent person may not be particularly good at searching for information because of how much information and noise there is on Google (or DDG or wherever). Ok? So given that, are you implying that the help center is as full of noise and hard to search as the rest of the internet, thus justifying the existence of SOA?

A lesson hard-learned during my time with SE has been that it is near-impossible to solve large behavioral problems by attacking them head-on. You have to convince a few people that there's a better way, and they'll do the same for a few more, and eventually you have enough believers to actually make a dent in it.

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in askin' good questions and walking out. They may think it's an Organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said Fifty people a day walking in askin' good questions and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement

And that's what it is, the Stack Overflow Academy Askin' Good Questions Movement, and all you gotta do to join is to sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar show two other people how to ask a decent question.

Besides, SOA isn't the equivalent of teaching people how to debug; don't pretend it is by linking it with noble goals like that. SOA is the equivalent of saying "Spoon-feeding you resources on how-to-ask isn't enough, so screw it, just ask us. But remember, do your research before asking." It's an oxymoron.

@Shog9 I know that. And you know that. But I am only trying to see things from your point of view and figure out where you were going with the hypothetical person; and again for the sake of argument I assumed it was because said intelligent person was just having trouble finding information. I don't actually believe that the internet is hard to search. I'm genuinely making an effort to guess where you are coming from.

@Shog9 No you don't. Not in the "how to ask" case. You just need to read e.g. Jon Skeet's question checklist. Why don't we just make that required reading and make passing a quiz on it a requirement for being able to post a question? :P

@JasonC let me try an example I've seen from Photography. Say you are asking about the thing that controls how much light gets in to the camera and makes the stuff blurry

now, to me, as an experienced photographer, I immediately recognize that as aperture, but if you didn't know terms like aperture or depth of field, you could have a lot of trouble finding that and instead end up looking at focus adjustments

@JasonC the decent understanding of the field is the part that doesn't fit

Look, we can argue all day long about whether SOA is a good idea or not. How about we just try it out? If it doesn't work out, then we can just burn the whole darn thing to the ground and pretend that it never existed, just like we do with all the other failed beta sites.

user163250

Because the way I see it, all of this constant arguing is just going around in circles and going no where.

@Cupcake NO. I am vehemently against "just trying it out" for reasons stated above. It's too "feel good" to fail after it gets started, and the long term bad effects are too slow to see until its too late. It just needs to go away now.

@Shog9 This isn't your usual proposal, though. All I'm asking is at least stay mindful that this is different, both in purpose and in how it "feels" to people, especially when interpreting the standard set of reactions like up/down votes and +1's.

@JasonC point is, everyone thinks their proposal is special / different / unique / deserving of special treatment. And sometimes they have really good arguments to back up that assertion. It doesn't matter; they still gotta pass muster when it comes to the normal boring criteria for sticking around / moving forward.

Mobile chat is missing a lot of features (understandable, as it's mobile). However, there are a number of features not currently implemented that are almost necessities:
Replies — Sure, we can type "@so-and-so" and hope we've gotten the so-and-so correct, but this doesn't work well when replyin...